Although they could probably use some more exciting branding, Concrete Cloth from the UK’s Concrete Canvas company is a pretty cool idea. The cloth, which is draped over forming members and then set by exposure to water (as, for instance, from rain), has a projected lifespan of 10 years.

I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c’t – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

Cool. This opens up all sorts of possibilities for more efficient uses of concrete.

Now that it is in cloth form, the old traditional and hard-to-use concrete shoes can be replaced with simple, stylish, and easy to use concrete sports coats!

Not only do they activate on contact with the water, they would help keep down the embarrassing and unprofessional floaty bits that invariably pop up with the traditional method after the feet fall off a couple weeks in.